First Hive Inspection!!

This morning I completed my first thorough inspection.   I'll admit to having peeked in on them, mainly to check that they had sufficient syrup.    But today, I completely opened up the hive and inspected every frame.    I was a little surprised at how the bees were just one on top of the other.   I thought they'd be a little more spread out ... and so I looked and looked but didn't spot the queen.   I did spot a few drones:

Look at those big eyes looking out at you in the lower center of the frame!

Another big boy.

When I first opened the frames, the bees were really clinging to one another.   Not sure what this is all about, perhaps I was breaking apart their "ball".

In any event, I removed each frame, one by one.   There was a fair amount of good comb being built up, as you can see in the next photo.   I think it's fascinating to see the progression of the comb, how it is gradually being built along the line of the perimeter, rather than cell by cell.    I suppose this makes sense when you think of how the comb is being layered and how anatomically the bees would go about that ... but it makes it I think even more amazing how they keep it all so uniform. 

There were quite a few cells filling up with pollen:

And in this next photo you can see glistening honey as well ... but I suppose since they are feeding off of sugar syrup this shouldn't be called honey ... but not sure what else to call it!

And while I didn't find the queen, I did spot eggs!   This was really exciting ... I'll was truly getting worries that I had no queen as I was seeing pollen and syrup/honey in every frame.    But as I started putting a frame back in the hive I noticed some eggs and so I looked closer and sure enough there were eggs in quite a few cells in two of the frames.    

Woo hoo!